The Cry of the Halidon (37 page)

“That’s a rather brass speculation, luv.”

“Oh, come off it, Peter. Alex knows what I mean.”

McAuliff laughed. “I don’t think he worries about money. He’s yet to submit his bills for the survey outfits. I have an idea they’re the most expensive in Harrod’s Safari Shop.”

“Perhaps he’s embarrassed,” said Peter, smiling. “He looks as though he had jumped right off the cinema screen. The black hunter; very impressive image, if somewhat contrived.”

“Now you’re the one who’s talking brass, luv. Charles
is
impressive.” Ruth turned to Alex. “My overage Lochinvar is green with envy.”

“That camera’s damn well new … not the sort of thing one lends, I shouldn’t think.” Peter looked at McAuliff as he spoke the non sequitur.

“Depends on the friend, I guess,” replied Alex, aware that Peter was implying something beyond his words. “Ferguson can be a likable guy.”

“Very,”
added Ruth. “And so helpless, somehow. Except when he’s over his equipment. Then he’s positively a whiz.”

“Which is all I really care about.” McAuliff addressed this judgment to Peter. “But then, you’re all whizzes, cameras and fancy clothes and aromatic pipes notwithstanding.” Alex laughed.

“Got me there, chap.” Peter removed his pipe and shook his head. “Dreadful habit.”

“Not at all,” said McAuliff. “I like the smell, I really do. I’d smoke one myself but my tongue burns. Then stings.”

“There are preventive measures, but it’s a dull subject.… What’s fascinating is this jungle laboratory we’re in. Have you decided on crew assignments?”

“Vaguely,” answered Alex. “Doesn’t make an awful lot of difference. Who do you want?”

“One of those brothers for me,” said Ruth. “They seem to
know exactly where they are. I’d be lost in half a mo’!… Of course, that’s selfish; my work is least important.”

“We still don’t want to lose you, do we, Peter?” McAuliff leaned forward.

“Not as long as she behaves.”

“Take your pick,” said Alex. “Marcus or Justice?”

“What marvelously dotty names!” cried Ruth. “I choose Justice.” She looked at her husband. “Always justice.”

“Yes, of course, my dear.”

“All right,” agreed McAuliff. “Then Marcus’ll be with me. One of them has to. And Alison asked for Lawrence, if you don’t mind, Peter.”

“Not at all, chap. Sorry his friend … what was his name? Floyd? Yes, Floyd. Sorry he jumped ship, as it were. Did you ever find out what happened to him?”

“No,” replied Alex. “He just disappeared. Unreliable guy. Something of a thief, too, according to Lawrence.”

“Pity … He seemed rather intelligent.”

“That’s
condescending, darling. Worse than brass.” Ruth Jensen picked up a tiny stone and chucked it into the narrow river offshoot.

“Then just pick out a stout fellow who’ll promise to lead me back to camp for meals and sleep.”

“Fine. I’ll do that. We’ll work four-hour field sessions, staying in touch by radio. I don’t want anyone going beyond a sonic mile from camp for the first few days.”

“Beyond!”
Ruth looked at McAuliff, her voice having risen an octave. “
Dear
Alex, if I stumble more than twenty feet into that maze of overgrowth, commit me!”

“Rubbish,” countered heir husband, “when you start cracking rocks, you lose time
and
distance.… Speaking of which, Alex, old boy, I presume there’ll be a fairly steady flow of visitors. To observe our progress; that sort of thing.”

“Why?” McAuliff was now aware that both husband and wife were sending out abstract, perhaps unconscious, signals. Peter less than Ruth. He was subtler, surer of himself than she was. But not completely sure. “We’ll bring out field reports every ten days or so. Rotate days off that way. That’ll be good enough.”

“Well, we’re not exactly at the end of nowhere; although I grant you, it looks like it. I should think the moneymen would want to check up on what they’re paying for.”

Peter Jensen had just made a mistake, and McAuliff was suddenly alarmed. “What moneymen?”

Ruth Jensen had picked up another stone, about to throw it into the brackish river. Arm poised, she froze for a second before hurling it. The moment was not lost on any of them. Peter tried to minimize it.

“Oh … some Royal Society titans or perhaps a few of these buggers from the Ministry. I know the R.S. boys, and God knows the Jamaicans have been less than cordial. I just thought … Oh, well, perhaps I’m off-center.”

“Perhaps,” said Alex quietly, “you’re ahead of me. On-site inspectors aren’t unusual. I was thinking about the convenience. Or lack of it. It took us nearly a day to get here. Of course, we had the truck and the equipment.… Still it seems like a lot of trouble.”

“Not really.” Peter Jensen tapped his pipe on his boots. “I’ve been checking the maps, looking about from the river clearing. The grasslands are nearer than we think. Less than a couple of miles, I’d say. Light planes or helicopters could easily land.”

“That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of it;” McAuliff leaned forward once again to engage Peter, but Peter did not look at him now. “I mean if we needed … equipment or supplies, we could get them much quicker than I’d anticipated. Thanks, Peter.”

“Oh, don’t
thank
him.” Ruth spoke with a nervous giggle. “Don’t
cater
to him.” She looked briefly at her husband; McAuliff wished he could have seen her eyes. “Peter just wants to convince himself he’s a hop-skip from a pub.”

“Rubbish. Just idle conversation, old girl …”

“I think he’s bored with us, Ruth,” said Alex, laughing softly, almost intimately. “I think he wants to see new faces.”

“As long as it’s not new bodies, my dear, the tolerance is possible,” retorted Ruth Jensen with throated caricature.

The three of them laughed out loud.

McAuliff knew the humor was forced. Mistakes had been made, and the Jensens were afraid.

Peter
was
looking for new faces … or a new face. A face he. believed Alex expected.

Who was it?

Was it possible … remotely possible that the Jensens were not what they seemed?

There was the sound of whistling from a path in the north bush. Charles Whitehall emerged into the clearing, his safari uniform pressed and clean, in counterpoint to the rumpled clothes of Marcus Hedrik, the older brother of the two Cock Pit runners. Marcus remained a respectful distance behind Whitehall, his passive black face inscrutable.

McAuliff rose from the ground and spoke to the Jensens. “It’s Charley. There’s a hill community several miles west of the river; he was going to try to hire a couple of hands.”

Ruth and Peter took their cue, because they very much wanted to. “Well, we’ve still got some equipment sorting to do,” said the husband, rising quickly.

“Indeed we do! Help me up, luv.”

The Jensens waved to Charles Whitehall and rapidly started for their tent.

McAuliff met Whitehall at the midpoint of the clearing. The black scholar dismissed Marcus Hedrik, instructing him to issue preparation orders to the rest of the crew about the evening patrols. Alex was fascinated to watch and listen to Charley-mon speaking to the runner. He fell easily into the hill country patois—damn near indecipherable to McAuliff—and used his hands and eyes in gestures and looks that were absolutely compatible with the obtuse speech.

“You do that very well,” said Alex as the runner trudged out of hearing.

“I should. It’s what you hired me for. I am the best there is.”

“That’s one of the things I like about you, Charley. You take compliments so gracefully.”

“You did not hire me for my graces. They are a bonus you don’t deserve.” Whitehall allowed himself a slight
smile. “You enjoy calling me ‘Charley,’ McAuliff?” he added.

“Do you object?”

“Not really. Because I understand. It is a defense mechanism; you Americans are rife with them. ‘Charley’ is an idiomatic leveler, peculiarly indigenous to the sixties and seventies. The Vietcong became ‘Charley,’ so too the Cambodians and the Laotians; even your man on the American street. It makes you feel superior. Strange that the name should be Charley, is it not?”

“It happens to be
your
name.”

“Yes, of course, but I think that is almost beside the point.” The black scholar looked away briefly, then back at Alex. “The name Charles is Germanic in origin, actually. Its root meaning is ‘full grown’ or possibly—here scholars differ—‘great size.’ Is it not interesting that you Americans take just such a name and reverse its connotation?”

McAuliff exhaled audibly and spoke wearily. “I accept the lesson for the day and all its subtle anticolonialism. I gather you’d prefer I call you Charles, or Whitehall, or perhaps ‘Great Black Leader.’ ”

“Not for a moment. Charley is perfectly fine. Even amusing. And, after all, it is better than Rufus.”

“Then what the hell is this all about?”

Whitehall smiled—again, only slightly—and lowered his voice. “Until ten seconds ago, Marcus Hedrik’s brother has been standing behind the lean-to on our left. He was trying to listen to us. He is gone now.”

Alex whipped his head around. Beyond the large tarpaulin lean-to, erected to cover some camp furniture against a forest shower, Justice Hedrik could be seen walking slowly toward two other crewmen across the clearing. Justice was younger than his brother Marcus, perhaps in his late twenties, and stockily muscular.

“Are you sure? I mean, that he was listening to us?”

“He was carving a piece of ceiba wood. There is too much to do to waste time carving artifacts. He was listening. Until I looked over at him.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Yes. Do. But do not give it undue emphasis. Runners are splendid fellows when they are taking in tourist groups; the tips are generous. I suspect neither brother is too pleased to be with us. Our trip is professional—worse, academically professional. There is not much in it for them. So there will be some hostility.”

McAuliff started to speak, then hesitated. He was bewildered. “I … I may have missed something. What’s that got to do with his listening?”

Whitehall blinked slowly, as if patiently explaining to an inept pupil—which, obviously, he felt was the case. “In the primitive intelligence, hostility is usually preceded by an overt, blunt curiosity.”

“Thank you, Dr. Strangelove.” Alex did not hide his irritation. “Let’s get off this. What happened over in the hill community?”

“I sent a messenger to the Maroon Town. I asked for a very private meeting with the Colonel of the Maroons. He will listen; he will accept.”

“I wasn’t aware a meeting was that tough to get. If I remember what Barak said, and I do, we just offer money.”

“We do not want a tourist audience, McAuliff. No tribal artifacts or Afro-Carib beads bought for an extra two-dollah-Jamaican. Our business is more serious than tourist trade. I want to prepare the colonel psychologically; make him think.”

Alex paused; Whitehall was probably right. If what Barak Moore had said had validity. If the Colonel of the Maroons was the sole contact with the Halidon, the decision to make that contact would not be lightly arrived at; a degree of psychological preparation would be preferable to none at all. But not so much as to make him run, avoid the decision.

“How do you think you accomplished that?” asked McAuliff.

“I hired the leader of the community to act as courier. I gave him a hundred dollars, which is like offering either of us roughly a quarter of a million. The message requests a meeting in four days, four hours after the sun descends over the mountains—”

“The Arawak symbols?” interrupted Alex.

“Precisely. Completed by specifying that the meeting should take place to the right of the Coromanteen crescent, which I would presume to be the colonel’s residence. The colonel was to send back the exact location with our courier.… Remember, the Colonel of the Maroon Tribes is an ancestral position; he is a descendant and, like all princes of the realm, schooled in its traditions. We shall know soon enough if he perceives us to be quite out of the ordinary.”

“How?”

“If the location he chooses is in some unit of four. Obviously.”

“Obviously.… So for the next few days we wait.”

“Not just wait, McAuliff. We will be watched, observed very closely. We must take extreme care that we do not appear as a threat. We must go about our business quite professionally.”

“I’m glad to hear that. We’re being paid to make a geological survey.”

W
ith the first penetration into the Cock Pit, the work of the survey consumed each member of the team. Whatever their private fears or foreign objectives, they were professionals, and the incredible laboratory that was the Cock Pit demanded their professional attentions.

Portable tables, elaborately cased microscopes, geoscopes, platinum drills, sediment prisms, and depository vials were transported by scientist and carrier alike into the barely penetrable jungles and into the grasslands. The four-hour field sessions were more honored in the breach; none cared to interrupt his experiments or analyses for such inconveniences as meals or routine communications. The disciplines of basic precautions were swiftly consigned to aggravating nuisances. It took less than a full working day for the novelty of the ever-humming, ever-irritating walkie-talkies to wear off. McAuliff found it necessary to remind Peter Jensen and James Ferguson angrily that it was mandatory to leave the radio receiving switches on, regardless of the intermittent chatter between stations.

The first evenings lent credence to the wisdom of Charles Whitehall’s purchases at Harrod’s Safari Shop. The team sat around the fires in canvas chairs, as though recuperating from the day’s hunt. But instead of talk of cat, horn, spore, and bird, other words flew around, spoken with no less enthusiasm.
Zinc, manganese, and bauxite; ochers, gypsum, and phosphate … Cretaceous, Eocene, shale, and igneous; wynne grass, tamarind, bloodwood; guano, gros-michel, and woman’s tongue
 … 
arid and acid and peripatus; water
runoffs, gas pockets, and layers of vesicular lava—honeycombs of limestone
.